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Conspiracy theorists are unlikely to enter Parliament. Photo / George Heard

OPINION:

This week's anti-whatever protest outside Parliament was a fizzer.

The march was trailered with much hand wringing that it might spiral into the occupation that disfigured Pipitea in February and March this year, or at least descend into the violence and aggression of the camp's last days - or even the kind witnessed at last year's anti-vaxx marches.

Sadly, the crowd was peppered with misogynist slogans directed at the Prime Minister, but it would be misleading to suggest these are particularly novel. One slogan - "ditch the bitch" - has been used on multiple woman politicians in this country, and I'm sure abroad.

This doesn't excuse it, but it would be misleading to suggest the venom of this protest is in any sense peculiar to our own time.

New Zealand has always had a lunatic fringe. Members of John Key's office will tell stories of fairly violent and conspiracist anti-TPP protesters trailing the prime minister through the regions.

There are perfectly good reasons to dislike the TPP (and its successor the CPTPP), but it is not, as one marcher proclaimed, a "conspiracy to commit treason".

We have changed as a country since the TPP marches. The conspiracy fringe does appear to have grown, and it appears to have grown more violent.

The Parliament occupation is remarkable because, while deluded, paranoid, vulnerable, and violent people have always existed here and abroad; we've never seen so many of them all at once, and so empowered to bring their worldview to the heart of power (Wellington is not the heart of our democracy, by the way - call me sentimental, but the heart of democracy, in my view, is disbursed, like a benign horcrux, across everyone privileged enough to enjoy the franchise).

You can't come away from watching the excellent Fire and Fury documentary, or read the equally excellent reporting from across the media of the people at the heart of this movement and conclude they don't present some kind of threat, first to themselves, and then to public figures, including politicians and the members of the media.

The most frightening aspect of the protest wasn't the slogans, but the fake court that convicted all MPs of crimes against humanity, but this wasn't frightening because it represented a threat to the real judicial system, but because of the potentially sinister and violent motivations of the people associated with it.

There's a tendency to draw the wrong lesson from these sorts of events. One of the fears, articulated earlier this year and capitalised upon by Brian Tamaki on the forecourt on Tuesday is that this fringe will enter Parliament and disrupt the political system.

This seems overblown.

Based on the turnout of the 2020 election, a new party would need to win a seat or poll 145,953 in the election to enter Parliament. The combined tally of every party that could be considered roughly conspiracist, (including the New Conservatives who scored 42,600), totalled just under 90,000 votes.

The only way into Parliament for these parties, as Tamaki knows, would be an Alliance-style tie-up.

This isn't unique.

Jami-Lee Ross self-consciously tried to emulate the Alliance with Advance New Zealand, and sought parties to join him. Unsurprisingly, fringe groups who cannot even agree on basic science, found it difficult to come together under a single leader. The two parties that went into Advance NZ, Jami-Lee Ross himself and Billy TK's Advance, eventually fell apart.

The Alliance is remarkable because it was so unique. It held together in no small part thanks to the skill and personality of leader Jim Anderton - and even then, the party couldn't survive long in Parliament into the new millennium.

It would take a miracle of political organisation and turnout for these groups to unify and make it into Parliament. The notion of them entering Parliament is a fun hypothetical but one better suited to the pub than the newspaper.

There's a sad irony that this debate is playing out at a time when New Zealanders might be talking about lowering the barriers to parliamentary representation. One of the Government's election reviews is currently looking at lowering the 5 per cent threshold to 4 per cent (still high enough to block any formulation of conspiracist parties from entering Parliament in 2020).

The debate about lowering the 5 per cent threshold is one worth having (as is lowering the voting age).

Since the election of Donald Trump, much ink has been spilled agonising over how "it" could happen here. We jump at every Trumpian shadow cast by our politicians - no matter how fine those shadows may be, or how infrequently they are cast. We wilfully neglect the immense electoral, political, and cultural differences between here and the United States.

Much less time is spent thinking about actual lessons that might be learned from overseas and applied here. One of the problems in the United States has not been that the wrong people get elected, as is the case with Trump, but that too few people vote and their electoral college system distorts the value of what (relatively) few votes are cast.

One lesson worth drawing is to think more about reducing the threshold for entering Parliament, or to consider the case made by the Make It 16 campaign to lower the voting age by two years.

One of the areas where the conspiracy fringe is most likely to obtain elected office is in local government, where apathy and low turnout lower the barrier for entry. It could be worth asking whether local government elections should be reformed so that local body elections more closely resemble general elections, drowning out the lunatic fringe with the electoral equivalent of the denominator effect.

There's a risk we learn the wrong lesson from conspiracy theorists. They are a clear danger to themselves and others, but there's no evidence yet they pose any threat to our democracy or the smooth functioning of Parliament.

See original here:
Thomas Coughlan: Conspiracy theorists not yet threat to democracy - New Zealand Herald